Aspies For Freedom

I'm actually working towards doing the same thing - planning on creating a self-sustaining house on a large property, then expanding from there.

One of the skills I've been researching are cheap and effective building materials like papercrete, which is 20% sand, 20% concrete and 60% newspaper - you can use it to make usual looking "brick" structures, or more exotic structures like this:


I've also been looking into grey water disposal and sewerage recycling systems, electricity generation, etc.

I worked out early on that we'd still need to make a small amount of money, as some mod cons I just couldn't live without (like broadband, books, a car), and also some things would be more trouble than they're worth to self-sustain (like milk - one cow or goat would be unreliable, and more than that would take too much resources in a small community. Especially when it's as cheap as it is to buy. Also toilet paper, shampoo and conditioner, and more exotic building materials like fencing wire). So before we can do it, we're working on some internet projects to make a small amount of money.

We're probably too far away to collaborate, but if you were interested in looking into setting a community up for real over there, I'd be happy to swap ideas...

Nah - I tend to think that if you got enough Autistics there in the first place, the social atmosphere would be enough to scare away any NT's that didn't have a reason to be there. And they'd find it harder to survive in workplaces that didn't run on social interaction to the extent they're used to.

An island would be great, but it would also be less easy for new people to get there. Plus, there's a few advantages of living near NT cities - trade comes to mind, as does opportunities for autistic rights advocacy, and tourism income.

This would probably be the hardest part. A possible solution would be to require residents to put a certain amount of time per week into assisting people that need assistance. This would also have the added benefit of discouraging people from moving in if they didn't have a reason to be there.

I think "Autistic schooling" would be enough of a deterrent, really. Ironically, I think we'd also need a "special needs" section for NT's at the school, assuming that another school wasn't in public transport distance.

Absolutely. In fact, I don't really think we'd need to exclude anyone, including NT's - Some NT's would have entirely valid reasons for being there, like family members of Autistic people, professionals wanting to learn from an Autistic lifestyle (there's an industry in that alone), or even journalists.

The sole exception would be curebie advocates, of course. The specifics of how to ban these people without limiting free speech would be quite complex - but I also think the social structure would make living there quite unpalatable for them, as being hated by an entire town wouldn't be pleasant - so maybe it's not needed.

Perhaps just banning actual representatives of pro-cure organisations would be enough.

It depends mostly on how big the community is, where it's located in relation to other cities, etc.

My personal preference would be for a large long & short term car park at each of the city entrances, a bypass road to allow people not wanting to stop in the city to travel through, and then damn good public transport inside.

Moving roads would probably take more energy than they're worth. A nice comprehensive monorail system would be perfect, with pathways for bikes and segways to get to the actual stations.

Hell yes! For one thing, I suspect a lot of the industries we'd set up would be internet based, and being able to give children constant free internet access would give them a big head start. For another, tourist income would likely be a big part of the city, and free internet everywhere would be a big "autistic" stamp -especially once we started coming up with creative and immersive uses of internet terminals (like ordering at restaurants, greater use of delivery services, free local video call booths, etc).

outsiders:

we would have a few options here: a couple being

Total Exception
residents would have to carry ID or a badge to be able to enter buildings: random checks on people who look like trouble,or loitering.
no outsiders permitted

Pros:
very,very low crime
a feeling of safety
Cons:
could be accused of a "cult" like practice
having to carry papers i know i would lose mine in...minutes.
1984...?

Curfew

residents may go anywhere,at anytime.however,after a set time,ID must be avalible-outsiders present after curfew would either be escorted to the place where they are staying,or taken "off site"

Pros:
would allow for visitors;removes possible accusations of cult activities

Cons:
nowhere near as secure
harder to enforce

the problem with both models,is,of course,the ID.
whats to prevent someone losing their ID,or,indeed,what about people who would simply refuse to carry it
well,whilst the community is small,it would still be possible for everyone to know everyone;however,as it grew,this would be harder and harder.

and of course,who would enforce it?

Again, I don't really think it's needed - Giving a city an Autistic "flavour" is plenty, and I think to encourage tourism income, we don't really want to exclude anyone. We would need a police force to limit actual troublemakers, of course - but that's a given for any city.

I also think that NT's would generally be discouraged from settling down by the Autistic culture - especially if we included assitance as a requirement for residency. A few would, of course, but I see no reason not to let them.

As far as ID goes, if it is needed (perhaps to see which people have access to services, etc) a simpler option would be to have ID based on name and birthdate, rather than an actual document. The person would give their name and ID, this would be punched into a computer, which would then bring up a photo that could be matched to the person standing there. If there was more security needed, for some reason, we could look at installing eye scanning or fingerprint scanning devices, etc.

hell,that was a brief summary

I'm thinking of consigning all my "Autistic Utopia" ideas to a word document, as well as outlining the technical concepts behind some of my ramblings ie:how to make a feasible "moving pavement",which would allow me to work out costs and power consumption

waddya reckon,do it or no?

Aye, much so! I can understand Erkolos's point about simpler measures towards an actual Autistic city, but at the same time, I think sometimes you need to have a big dream to aim for to get things moving...

Keep us all updated! The moving pavement idea is something I've pondered in the past (along the lines of Asimovs concentric moving path model), but you'd need tens of thousands of people to make it worthwhile.

The other option would be to have a very small community near a creek or a river, and hydro-power the whole thing. There'd be lots of maintenance costs, but it might be worth the novelty...

I still think that segway and bicycle paths plus public transport would be more practical, but at the same time, one must never underestimate the power of novelty.

In fact, I think I'll rant about this tonight. Stay tuned!

Errr... We did? That's news to me... Oh well, hopefully it wasn't too big a deal, whatever it was...

Ah, okie doke - that was a long while ago, and me and Max get along pretty well these days.

Anyways, I just posted a "Neuro City" flavoured rant here - http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/showthre...824&page=9

It's the 18/11/07 one. Enjoy!

Absolutely - but to me, a high density of Autistic people in an urban area would fit the definition of an Autistic city. Especially when you consider that if enough of us were there, we'd be able to vote in a local council and actually have some power over city planning.

In fact, it's one of the suggestions I put out there as to how to build an Autistic city.

I've always wondered if it would be possible to create industrial-strength lego - perhaps with spring-loaded snap locks to compliment the usual "circle-to-circle" connectors.

All you'd need is to lay down foundations, and then the rest of the building process would be much quicker - you could even redesign on the fly if you needed a bigger room for a special occasion, or lots of smaller rooms for having guests over.

NT's wouldn't be excluded - the idea would be to make a place that was autistic-friendly, rather than just NT-exclusory. I suspect NT's wouldn't be banging down the doors to the city, or anything like that.

In fact, if done right, it would be entirely possible to make a decent income for the city off NT tourism dollars (i.e. they could see "the autistic experience").

The only tricky thing would be trying to get information out to NT's before they came here, so they would know what to expect. While it's small-scale and in the middle of nowhere, the easiest way would be to have website information before anyone booked holiday rooms, or anything similar. For a bigger-scale city, though, I have no idea.

I guess the bigger-scale city is still pretty much a pipe dream for now, but it's interesting to talk about. And who knows how far things could go, really?

I've got a 1-2 year timeframe for purchasing some land out in Tabulam - it's pretty cheap to buy up land in the middle of nowhere.

The actual "city" idea was more of the fanciful variety, and I'd probably only work on that after the little community idea was working solidly. I've always thought the island idea would be impractical to start off with.

It's a good idea - the problem would be trying to get everyone organised to do it all at once. With my little self-sustaining community idea, it would basically just be me & Bella to start off, and we'd invite others along after things were set up properly.

Yep, I plan to buy the land - so that wont be a problem. After it gets bigger, the idea would be to have any further land-ownership held by a community group, and use money raised by community-run business ideas to expand.

By curebies, I meant the more sort of obvious curebieism - for example, we wouldn't allow Autism Speaks to set up meetings in the city, or allow representatives of curebie groups to move in under that capacity. I wouldn't kick people out for holding an individual belief.

Oops! Getting my threads mixed up - I had a thread about an autistic self-sustaining community a while back - I thought this was it...*sheepish grin*

Bong...Bong...

Due to...monetary difficulties the Gongaga Reactor reconstruction efforts have been put on temporary hiatus, that is all.


Bong Bong

hmmm ... I withdraw my nomination. There is obviously something more than street smarts needed for this job.